ROCK PAPER SCISSORS Soonja Han Life, Love, and Death 1999-2003 Mixed media 51 x 90.5 in / 130 x 230 cm Courtesy of the artist /(,/$+(//(5*$//(5< 568 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 +1 212-249-7695 www.leilahellergallery.com [email protected] ROCK PAPER SCISSORS Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath July 12 - August 18, 2012 Leila Heller Gallery, New York ROCK JACKSON POLLOCK 14 KASPER SONNE 16 LOUISE NEVELSON 18 PAPER HADIEH SHAFIE 22 KIM CHUN HWAN 24 ROB CARTER 26 SCISSORS JIM DINE 30 LOUISE BOURGEOIS 32 SOONJA HAN 34 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE ROCK PAPER SCISSORS Rock, Paper, Scissors is at once an exploration of the formalistic the offspring of the ‘readymade,’ are simultaneously consumed and produced by the artist as choices that artists chose to adopt and adapt, as well as a differentiated they are being projected onto another symbolic-semantic plane altogether.” 4 exploration of the metaphorical qualities that each of the three words suggests. Similar to the children’s game, where winning very much With these ruminations in mind 5, Rock, Paper, Scissors is a double folded statement that depends on choosing, the exhibition is more keen on exploring the ponders the broad range within the formalistic trends that have come to define the artist’s individual act of committing to a specific medium both as a contemporary moment of artistic production. The exhibition explores the extent to which mode of expression and as a symbol for a politicized gesture. At no contemporary art oscillates between a concern for art-historical lineage on the one hand, point in this exhibition are we interested in trumping one genre over and an intergenerational rupture on the other. The works assembled here are all equally another, or presenting the three media it explores within contrived grappling with the notion of continuity as far as aesthetic expression is concerned, while hierarchies and classifications. at the same time manifesting an almost ontological desire for asserting an original departure in formal expression. With the chaotic proliferation of production, and the accessibility to an infinity of heterogeneous visual traditions and social objects On a more metaphorical level, the exhibition seeks to explore the extent to which facilitated by today’s technologies of communication and modes of contemporary art remains equally engaged with questions of subversion and “politicality”, travel, the tabula rasa available to today’s artists is no longer a clean with notions of radicalism and “art as life”. As August Wilson once said, “All art is political in slate that they can inscribe with the “novel,” but an infinite plethora the sense that it serves someone’s politics.” 6 The formal choices made by each of the nine of forms, albeit exhausted, ready to be inserted into new settings, to artists in the exhibition reflect more than just a negotiation with medium and technique. They be appropriated, even plagiarized. The process of recruiting these evidence an adoption of a specific modus operandi that points towards an acute consciousness “forms” and the perception of new materials as possible compositional of where these formal choices sit in relationship to the ones made by their contemporaries. elements for artistic production have replaced the traditional notion In other words, the choice of medium becomes as much, a means of self-differentiation as it of art as the mark of a specialized manual “skill” that separates the is a technical result of the creative process. artist from other human beings. Rock stands for the three dimensional object. It could be a metaphor for sculpture. But it This “eclecticism” (we use the term here for its positive connotations, also refers to Monuments and Monumentality. The Monument has always been defined by and not in its Greenbergian sense) 1 was adopted early on, albeit the agencies and histories that it is made to convey. In that sense, it is the final stage of a differently, by Europe’s new realists and America’s pop artists. In politicized act of marking a certain ideology, promulgating a specific narrative and fostering a protesting the purifying zeal of modernism, they expanded the constructed collective identity. formal vernacular of art by sequestering new iconographical material inspired by the visual terminology of advertising and the rise in mass Setting the tone for this section, and for the entire exhibition for that matter is a rare production/consumption. A decade or so later, no longer capable of stone sculpture by Jackson Pollock from the early thirties. Carved out from a raw piece of being eschewed, this over-production propelled conceptual artists stone, a small head a little bigger than the size of a clenched fist manifests that introspective to the dematerialization of art and to the removal of the object as an gaze of an artist’s mind. Serene yet troubled, the face manages to capture that quest for attack on its “special or privileged status; a status which removes creative expression that every artist has to undertake alone in search for his or her own art objects from their everyday settings and renders them immune individual form of expression. The two other artists in this section Louise Nevelson and to common-sense assumptions.” 2 New formal sensibilities had to Kasper Sonne, while representing a different generation and moments of artistic production, be advanced to keep up with a world of endlessly shifting loci. Hello each works as a sculptor and with the three dimensional object employing the medium to Post-modernity! The form of art (in contrast to art forms) as the world become a statement on how an artwork can become a monument of sorts that is at once knew it was to change forever. Soon the conterminous fascination absent and present, meaningful and meaningless. In doing so, they challenge the process with new technology would allow for the absorption of more forms by which art as monument can become a tool through which certain associations and and modes of representation laying the foundations for what Rosalind conclusions can be reached vis-à-vis the “gaze” of the beholder. Nevelson’s work stands Krauss would refer to, more than three decades later, as the “Post- as a constant reminder of how the human brain functions when confronted with the Medium Condition.” 3 In order to drag themselves out from the morass familiar that has been appropriated into something unfamiliar altogether. Sonne’s of the bankrupt “high culture” of modernity, inexorably confined to an encasement of his previous canvases within stele-like monoliths confront the viewer ideology of framing, artists had to supplant the canonical with the with a metaphor of entombment in which the artist’s sculptural work creates a politicized popular, replace the sanctimonious with the profane. “By some sort of rejection of a previous aesthetic for the same of a monumental statement about his Duchampian twist of ironic affirmation and inversion, today’s forms, own artistic choices. Paper stands for a distinct medium, less intrusive and seemingly fragile, and, according to and tracing circles has become a major statement that defines a life-long quest for a personal many, the art form that is most difficult to master. Every child had their share of Paper and form of artistic expression that is at once informed in the modernist expression of geometric Pencil whether they became artists or not. In other words, paper speaks to the intuitive in all constructivism, yet in dialogue with contemporary trends that explore the infinite manifestations of us. On a different level, paper is that surface on which all is inscribed. History, prayer, diaries, of a recurring concept. In the mid 1960’s, Dine began to incorporate mundane objects into his architectural plans, the daily news… Thus, it is a metaphor for the transmission and at times work with a gestural dynamism informed by that of Abstract Expressionism. The tools, scissors coercion of knowledge, becoming a container for something bigger than what the words or included, represent Dine’s childhood memories of his family’s hardware store in Cincinnati. images stand for alone. In line with his earlier happenings that involved chance and audience participation, his works depicting tools defy the rigid boundaries of “high art” and reflect a disregard for the confines The three artists in this section, Kim Chun Hwan, Rob Carter and Hadieh Shafie, work with of traditional artistic practice. Last but not least, Bourgeois’ use of fabric also references her paper as both aesthetic medium and vessel of knowledge. They each negotiate the original personal history. She grew up in her parent’s tapestry restoration business, her childhood utilitarian function for which the paper was employed, transforming it into an artwork that is surrounded by the reparation of 17th and 18th century textiles. Bourgeois’s peripatetic, capable of pushing the boundaries of paper as medium as well as challenging the notion of philandering father sought out fragmentary, often damaged tapestries, while her mother, patient, paper as palimpsest. Kim Chun Hwan, for instance, works with newspapers, magazines, and reasonable, and, as Bourgeois notes, more “scientific,” would match their colors, dye new wool auction catalogues transforming them to paintings that question the content that the papers and painstakingly re-weave them. Bourgeois’s later fabric collages and assemblages – their included in the first place. Shafie appropriates prayer scrolls into a constructed surface that many disparate pieces assembled and sewed together – attest to the early influence of this replaces the traditional canvas and becomes the foundation for a new composition where restorative process, as well as to the conceptual and psychological connotations of the words color replaces words and texture and patterns assume center stage in the process of visual associated with it: cut, unravel, weave, knot, stitch, mend.